


The Autobiography of Kirsten Clancy

by Curator



Category: Star Trek: Picard
Genre: Gen, I doubt official Star Trek will ever do this so I figured I would, the sheer fucking hubris eh?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-17
Updated: 2021-03-22
Packaged: 2021-03-25 15:07:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30090960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Curator/pseuds/Curator
Summary: The story of Starfleet’s commander-in-chief, proud Martian native, and firm believer in the power of all peoples.
Comments: 20
Kudos: 7





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I usually wait until a story is fully written to post, but I know where I want this to go … and I figured I should hurry up before season two spoilers get out and possibly destroy my headcanons. I have a bunch of chapters written and will update as I can, so please subscribe if you like what you see.

# Foreword

I must admit my surprise when Kirsten asked me to pen the foreword to her autobiography.

“You’ll tell them the truth, Jean-Luc,” she said. “You fucked off with that diplomacy bullshit a long time ago.”

She does have a way with words.

And so, in the interests of the straightforward delivery Kirsten so ardently prizes, I shall say this: During my time in Starfleet and afterward, I have found Kirsten to be a stalwart defender of honesty, the people under her command, and the preservation of the United Federation of Planets. Her mind is quick, discerning, and bold. If Kirsten is to be corrected, the humble voice wishing to inform her of new information must be ready to impart facts, ramifications, and options in rapid succession lest her patience wear thin at any appearance of grandstanding or lack of preparation. 

Kirsten Clancy does not tolerate fools.

I first met Kirsten when she was an ensign aboard the _Enterprise-D_ , a vessel I commanded as captain. From Kirsten’s initial post in engineering to her later service as my ship's flight control officer, she brought confidence and a sense of purpose to her work. Surely there is, too, a certain poetic satisfaction that the pilot of a Galaxy-class starship would soar to rarefied heights within Starfleet.

It is my fervent hope that you will enjoy getting to know her in the pages that follow.

— Jean Luc Picard, proprietor, Chateau Picard Winery

# Chapter 1

My tiny chest burned.

I imagined my arms and legs as blurs. Had I ever run this fast?

“Slow down, you jerk!” I shouted, familiar buildings flashing by my peripheral vision. “Or at least give me my padd!”

My schoolbag thudded against my back and I was sure my face was beet-red. The sun was high in the butterscotch-colored sky, and the sidewalk wasn’t crowded the way it would be in a few hours with commuters on their way home. 

“This padd?” My older brother, Brian, dangled the device behind him, as if I could snatch it away if I was only a little faster. “The one you were supposed to use for your schoolwork?”

“I was using it for my schoolwork!”

“Bullshit.”

My outstretched fingers trembled. I was so close … if I could just —

The cool metal of the padd caught on my fingertips and clattered to the sidewalk. I stopped short, chest heaving, legs burning. I bent to pick up the padd and the upward shift of textbook padds in my schoolbag almost toppled me.

But Brian’s shoe landed on the padd I cared about most, trapping it on the sidewalk.

I crouched and squinted upward, the early afternoon sun behind my brother’s head rendering him temporarily faceless.

“Mom and Dad are going to be so mad at you.” Brian was twelve years old, three years older than I was, with a big, sneaker-clad foot still on my padd. “And if you don’t tell them, I will.”

My desperate fingernails edged between the padd and the sidewalk. I imagined I could pull the device away, magically erase my brother’s memory, and go on with life as if he had never looked over my shoulder as we rode the hover-tram home from school.

“It’s not a big deal.” I spoke through clenched teeth. “Don’t be such a butthole.”

Brian’s hands went to his heart and he spoke in a falsetto imitation of our mother. 

“I’m disappointed in you, Kirsten. You have an affinity for calculus, an aptitude for the biological sciences, and a real talent for physics. And this is how you choose to spend your time?” Brian’s falsetto dropped to a horrified whisper. “Reading a storybook? And not even a proper Martian storybook, an Earth storybook. Earth is ...”

I joined in, “... an unseemly place for unseemly people.”

“And Dad will just ask a hundred —”

There was a sharp pain against my back. I turned. A Bolian glared at my brother and me.

“Get off the sidewalk, little girl. Someone might accidentally kick a dustpile like you.”

Brian leapt to his feet, hands balled into fists. I grabbed my padd and stuffed it into my schoolbag. 

“What did you just say to my sister?”

The Bolian was at least thirty centimeters taller than Brian and more than double his width. 

“I called her,” the Bolian sneered, “a dustpile. I suppose the same applies to you.”

“Watch your mouth, blueface.” Brian’s chin rose and his eyes narrowed. “Be nice to kids or mind your own goddamn business.”

My legs were still wobbly from running, but I wanted to tug on Brian’s wrist and sprint until we were home. It was only a few more blocks — and the Bolian probably wouldn’t be able to follow us if we cut through the marketplace. It was always crowded there.

But my feet wouldn’t listen. I flinched, waiting for the Bolian to continue to yell at my brother.

Or call the authorities.

Or punch him in the face. 

But the Bolian walked past us with a sniff, muttering about pink children having no manners.

Brian jerked his head and I fell into step with him. 

“You okay?” he asked. 

“Yeah.” My fingers tightened on the straps of my schoolbag. My daydream had come true. It was as if Brian had forgotten about tattling to our parents. “Thanks for yelling at that guy.”

“I didn’t yell.” Brian’s arms crossed. “Never yell at a bully, Kirsten. Just tell him his options, and make sure one of them is to stop hassling you. Stay in control and let the bully decide to fuck off.”

It was as if my padd was glowing, lighting up my schoolbag for everyone to see. 

“Brian,” I was careful not to yell, “you can ask me why my padd is so important to me or you can just promise that you won’t tell Mom and Dad.”

His face, so like mine in shape and coloring under a mop of brown hair, split in a proud grin.

“Why is your padd so important to you, Kirsten?”

I pointed to a street sign. In addition to the name of the road, the sign also had the name of the city where we lived: Quayle Canals. My siblings and I and our mother and our mother’s mother and our mother’s mother’s mother stretching back to a colonial founder of Mars who helped terraform piles of dust into a thriving planet — we all shared the last name Quayle.

“I want to be someplace else, sometimes.” I shrugged slightly, as if I wasn’t embarrassed to finally speak the words out loud. “Reading stories on my padd can take me to Andor or Vulcan … or Earth. I can be in the past or the future. I can forget about Mars Heritage Day or the Fundamental Declarations or all the Martian stuff Mom expects us to care about and I can see how people live in other places.”

An arm landed across my shoulders.

“All right, I won’t tell on you. This time.” Brian rolled his eyes at my quick, excited embrace around his midsection. “But don’t read that stuff where you can get caught.”

I knew, I _knew_ , I should keep quiet.

But I couldn’t.

“Or what?” I asked.

“Or next time I won’t teach you how to change my mind.”

Brian’s arm dropped from my shoulders and he play-punched my schoolbag, but not hard enough to rustle the precious padd inside.

Our smiles were identical.

Of course they were.

Outwardly, the Quayle children looked remarkably similar with slim builds, dark hair, and pale skin.

The eldest of the four of us was Rosie, nineteen years old and already at Columbia Hills University, nearly a hundred kilometers away. I liked to go in her room at home and look through her things, especially filmy scarves folded into her dresser. So sophisticated, I thought, as I would throw one after the other high into the air and watch them float back down. 

Next was Nora, fourteen years old with dirt under her fingernails even the most dedicated scrubbing couldn’t remove. Nora could grow anything in the containers our parents gave her for our balconies and in the plots she reserved every year at the community garden. Vegetables were her favorite, though — practical, sensible — and her tomatoes were so good that I often ate one for a snack.

Brian, at twelve years old, was the household’s tinkerer. Our mother would walk into the kitchen to see replicator parts all over the floor and Brian half-buried in the wall so he could examine more circuitry. But she knew better than to scold him. By the time he was finished, the replicator or the clothes refresher or whatever else he had taken apart would be put back together and running at increased efficiency and precision.

Then there was me, age nine and already a padd-sneak who loved her family fiercely but knew the circles that bound us — our home together, our cousins and aunts and uncles, our friends whose parents were all friends with our parents — wouldn’t tether me the way they had everyone else to this planet with red dust that seemed baked into my very veins. 

Finally, there was Darcy, age five and obsessed with math. She had an abacus, two calculators, and a propensity to share times tables or square roots at the slightest provocation … or none at all.

We were expected to attend our mother’s events. As Secretary of Martian Ecology and the Environment, she had constant political obligations, often outside in weather that ranged from balmy to freezing. But re-election was important and inspiring the younger generation, she explained to us, was good optics so it was best to look interested and, if we could manage it, excited. We sometimes accompanied our father, too, for lectures associated with his position in the Martian Department of Education, but those events, fortunately, were usually when we had to be in school.

This was the world Brian and I knew that afternoon when we walked home with secrets inside my padd.

And, for me, that world got a whole lot smaller only a few weeks later.


	2. Chapter 2

The cause of my world-shrinking was my Great Aunt Vivienne.

“But I don’t have a Great Aunt Vivienne,” I told my mother, who had run from her office off our foyer to greet Brian and me when we got home from school. There were eight great-aunts on my mother’s side and ten on my father’s, all of whom, like the rest of the family, were frequent visitors to our home on the top two floors of a large apartment building. 

“She’s your father’s aunt and she’s been away for many years.” My mother’s pasted-on smile, the one I knew so well from her political events, appeared and wavered for a moment. “But she’s family and she’s going to be here in a few hours, so set an extra place at the table.”

Brian hung his schoolbag on his hook. “Just one extra place?”

Family usually came in groups. 

“Just one.” My mother turned and called over her shoulder as she walked back to her office, “Use the regular plates and silverware. Not the fancy stuff. And, Brian, set the replicator for family dinner casual number four, seven people, not family dinner formal.”

Strange.

I set the table and spent the next few hours reading or playing games over the comm with my friends. 

“She’s your aunt, but you’ve never heard of her?” On my screen, Jo twirled an oblong piece from Sweep, a Martian combination of checkers and chess, in their fingers.

“Great-aunt, and yeah.”

“Damn. Maybe she’s been in prison.”

I pictured a grizzled woman, hardened by a life of crime, then incarceration in a penal colony in which she had to mine dilithium to exchange for luxuries like use of a replicator. Maybe she slept on a cot surrounded by other prisoners on other cots like in _The Enormous Room_ or maybe the prison banned universal translators and she learned to communicate with her prison friends by learning their languages like in _My Ordeal_.

“Kirsten? Are you okay?”

If Jo knew I had read Earth books, they would tell their mother and then my mother would know and I would be in trouble. 

“Yeah, prison would be cool. Your turn for Sweep, Jo.”

When the doorbell chimed, I rushed to meet the tough, unbowed prisoner.

I tapped, the door slid, and there she was.

Black boots, pants, and belt. Maroon jacket, a white strip of cloth over one shoulder, and scattered pins with gold emblems. An oval pin on her chest had a silver overlay of a strange shape, sort of a triangle with a curved bottom. I stared at it. 

“You must be Kirsten!” Her arms opened. “I’m your Great Aunt Vivienne and I’m so excited to meet you!”

My feet moved backward. I had seen clothes and pins like these before — in the marketplace. My parents always said not to pay any mind, that the people who wore those strange things probably worked at the Utopia Planitia Shipyards and I was not to talk to them or to their children, all of whom went to a different school from mine.

“Vivienne.” My mother stepped out from her office. “You said 1800 hours. We weren’t expecting you so soon.”

The wall clock displayed 1800 hours, exactly. 

My great-aunt’s laugh was like dust clouds clearing on a sunny day. “I’m sorry, Heather. After so many years in Starfleet, I guess I forgot about ‘Martian time.’ Should I go and come back in fifteen minutes for the sake of etiquette or can you forgive a weary traveler?”

Starfleet.

What was Starfleet?

My mother shouted for the other kids to come greet their great-aunt, my father got home from work, and everything seemed out of time, speeded up and slowed down. Great Aunt Vivienne’s teeth flashed white when she bit into one of Nora’s carrots that my dad put out as part of a Crudités platter. My sister Darcy’s lips formed pink bows that curled upward when Great Aunt Vivienne quizzed her on math facts. The dark, vertical lines that formed between both my parents’ eyebrows became deeper and deeper … which was strange because my great-aunt seemed to be having fun, laughing and smiling and eating — and hospitality was very, very important to my parents.

“What about you, Kirsten?” My great-aunt’s thoughtful gaze turned to me after she chatted with my siblings. “What’s your favorite subject in school?”

A lump of replicated family dinner casual number four stuck in my throat. 

“I’m sorry.” I swallowed. “I don’t really have a favorite. I like them all.”

My great-aunt’s smile was encouraging. “Well-rounded is good.”

No it wasn’t. Darcy could talk about math for hours and Brian already knew that one day he wanted to go to the Daystrom Institute of Technology university campus not far from where Rosie was working toward her degree in community management. Everyone knew Nora would probably study some kind of agriculture and maybe even join our mother in the government’s Office of Ecology and the Environment.

I just wanted to play with my friends and not get caught reading the books that let me pretend I was somewhere else.

My cheeks burned and I blinked rapidly as my father took over. “Kirsten is a great kid, Aunt Vivienne. When her model of the early Martian orbital gliders fell off the judges’ table at the science fair, Kirsten didn’t lose her shit. She just gathered the pieces and put everything back together from memory. Isn’t that impressive?”

I had told everyone I’d worked so hard building the model that it was easy to remember how to rebuild it. 

But the truth was I knew how to reconstruct the model because of an Earth myth I had read about Icarus, the boy who flew too close to the sun and died. The story’s lesson had helped me calculate the orbital glider’s wing angles for appropriate lift through the atmosphere without burning up.

“That sure is impressive.” My great-aunt nodded toward my father. “Sounds like Kirsten is The Little Engine That Could.”

The compliment — and image of myself as a train — sent me into giggles. “Thank you.”

Five foreheads furrowed as my mother, father, brother, and two sisters at the table all registered confusion.

I had understood the reference to an Earth story about the value of perseverance — a story that no Martian of our social class should know. 

Shit.

“Kirsten,” my father slowly laid down his fork, “what or who is The Little Engine That Could?”

“I …” replicated family dinner casual number four sloshed in my stomach, “I don’t know. It just sounded funny.”

Great Aunt Vivienne’s eyebrow cocked toward my father. “Really? You work for an educational system that still keeps kids this much in the dark about other worlds?”

“Preservation of our society is important.” My father was already sitting up straight but he sat up straighter. “When children are old enough to make choices, they will. Teaching the Martian ways ensures our culture is foremost in their minds.” 

“Teaching the Martian ways to the exclusion of other cultures ensures a steep learning curve to interacting with the rest of the Federation, where certain assumptions about a common set of values across planets allow Starfleet to —”

My mother joined the debate. “We teach our values, here, in our own way. That’s our prerogative, Vivienne, and I must say that it’s none of your fucking business what happens on Mars when you’re off on your space explorations. I hope you enjoyed your dinner and our visit together.”

Plates were still half full.

Great Aunt Vivienne plucked her napkin from her lap and folded it carefully. “Thank you for a lovely meal. It was a pleasure to meet your younger children and I hope Rosie does well on the exam she needed to study for at school. I have plans to see relatives every day of my time here. If you want to discuss anything further, you have my comm frequency. Nora, Brian, Kirsten, Darcy — you’re wonderful kids and I wish each of you the very best.”

Then the napkin was on her plate and she was gone.

“Kirsten,” my father's rumble of disappointment cut through the silence, “Your mother and I will talk with you in your room in a few minutes. You’re excused from dinner.”

I ran from the table, shaking.

But as frightened as I was of what my parents would say, as much as guilt sat heavy on my chest for having disrupted dinner, as much as I wasn’t sure what to do about my sisters’ gaping mouths or my brother’s worried eyes … my mind also was singing a song of hope it had never known before about Starfleet, space exploration, and the possibility of getting the comm frequency of someone who might understand just how much I yearned to know more about people and places and — life! — beyond Mars.


	3. Chapter 3

I didn’t have to wait long for my parents to knock on my door.

“Come in.”

I sat cross-legged on my bed, my stuffed goat hugged tight to my chest. 

The door opened and my father entered, his flustered hand smoothing his shirt over his stomach. My mother’s hand, however, was outstretched. “I want to see your padd.”

Somehow, my fingers were steady enough to pull the device from under my pillow. 

My mother turned the padd on. My father looked over her shoulder as she scrolled. 

And scrolled.

And scrolled.

Fat tears ran down my cheeks and I held Goatie closer to me, sniffling into his plush head. 

“I won’t pretend to know many of these books, Kirsten.” My father’s head shook slightly. “But some of the ones I do know are much too mature for you. Why have you been reading books from Earth and other planets I’m not sure I recognize?”

How could I tell them? How could I tell my parents who had given me a great life how much I wanted to know what else was out there?

“I …” My throat burned and my tears kept falling and I couldn’t hold Goatie tight enough. “I don’t know.”

My mother sat on my bed, her hand cool on my knee. “Are you trying to fit in with other kids? Is someone pressuring you to read these things?”

I shook my head. “No — no one knows except Brian. He found out by accident and promised to keep it a secret.”

My father’s fingers squeezed my mother’s shoulder — gratitude that this shame could be contained. If my parents’ friends found out, there would be gossip and my parents didn’t like gossip about anyone.

The padd screen went dark and my mother tapped to turn it on again, the long list of books I had read filling the display. 

“So how did it start, Kirsten? Dad and I want to understand.”

I scrunched my eyes shut. “I found a library code in the marketplace that let me access the Federation database. The first book I downloaded was a story about a princess who had trouble fitting in. I didn’t know it was an Earth book, but I liked the story and — and then I chose more books. Sometimes I didn’t understand everything, but I just … I wanted to know.”

My father’s voice floated through the darkness. “Wanted to know what?”

I opened my eyes and, for a second, my room was brilliant white. “Everything. I want to know everything about other places and other people.”

My father sat on my other side. His arm went around my shoulders. “Why?”

I shrugged, the weight of his arm constricting my movement. “I just do.”

“Go to your bathroom.” My mother patted my knee. “Wipe your face and then come back.”

I leapt off the bed, still clutching Goatie. In the bathroom mirror, my face was mottled and my eyes rimmed red. But this talk hadn’t been as bad as I’d feared. They hadn’t taken it personally, my wanting something beyond my family. They hadn’t insulted Earth or the other planets. They had just seemed … confused, like I was someone they thought they knew but then it turned out they didn’t.

Was that true?

I blinked at my reflection. 

When I returned to my room, my mother’s arms were crossed and my father’s jaw was clenched. I retook my place between them on the bed, Goatie on my lap. 

“We’ve made a decision, Kirsten.” My father handed me my padd. When had my mother let him hold it? “You can keep downloading books from other planets, but within your age range. If you want to access a book the library computer categorizes as too old for you, then you need to ask me or Mom. And you are to continue to keep your reading to yourself unless you have a question, in which case you should ask one of us. Do you understand?”

I had expected my padd to be blank. But my books, my open windows to the fresh air of somewhere else, were still there — except for a few of the ones I had understood the least.

My mouth opened, but no sound came out. 

“When a learner reaches for knowledge, it is our honor to facilitate that endeavor.” My father had shifted into one of his speeches for the Martian Department of Education. I recognized the words and the shift in his intonation. “The teacher is a guide for an eager mind, a trusted —”

“Exactly.” My mother’s arms uncrossed. “A guide. Someone a child can trust to keep her safe, not throw her into the dust storm like some kind of —”

“Heather.” My father glared at my mother. 

“Paul.” My mother glared right back. 

“Great Aunt Vivienne.” I held my padd so tightly that the tips of my fingers ached.

My parents’ heads swiveled toward me. 

“If I need a guide, could I comm Great Aunt Vivienne? She knows what it’s like to be Martian and she knows what it’s like to be other places. She said it was a pleasure to meet me and that she wished me the very best. Maybe she could help me?”

This time, when my parents’ eyes met, they were wide with something that looked like fear.

“A year,” my father said. “Prove you can be a good Martian for a year, keeping quiet about your books except with Mom and me, and then you can comm your great-aunt.”

My excitement burbled out of me in squeals and laughter, and I thanked my parents over and over. My mother accepted my hug of gratitude and, with my back to my father, I heard him murmur to her, “All children go through phases. Give it time.”

But a year went by in a flash of Brian teasing me and Nora’s harvests and Darcy’s math facts and Rosie coming home on break and asking why her scarves were all wrinkled. It was a year of sitting with my siblings in uncomfortable seats at my parents’ events and school and friends and cousins and aunts and uncles and books, books, books. It was a year of envisioning a moment that finally came true when my ten-year-old finger typed in the comm frequency my father had given me as my mother’s lips had pressed themselves into a tight line, then a face filled my screen and I breathed, “Great Aunt Vivienne?” 

Her head tipped back and her laugh was so like my own laugh in delight, and she said, “I’m happy to see you, Kirsten. Your father said you might comm me. What can I do for you?” 

And I said, “Please … please tell me — tell me about Starfleet.”


End file.
